Pot Still Yield and Profit on a Forty-Gallon Run Under the 1865 Whiskey Tax

My bear Barnaby lies chained outside the window of the still-house here at Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, chewing his chain in the hope it will turn into a pork chop. The Treasury holds much the same hope about my pocketbook. This week I did not experiment with copper alone. I took a slate and a stub of chalk to one ordinary week's work and followed every bushel and every stick of wood to the jug. A still-keeper in these hills lives one sour tub away from eating his own boots, and the sums will show you why.

The Government's Slice, Counted in Proof Gallons

Before you weigh a single bushel, learn how the tax man counts. He does not count gallons as your wife counts them. He counts proof gallons. A proof gallon is one gallon of spirit at one hundred proof, which is half alcohol and half water by volume. Run your spirit stronger and each wine gallon counts as more than one proof gallon. Water it down and it counts as less. It is the only place in the federal government where anybody has asked for proof of anything.

When Mr. Lincoln's men first laid the tax in the summer of 1862, it was twenty cents a proof gallon. In March of 1864 it rose to sixty cents. In July of 1864 it went to a dollar and a half. On the first day of January, 1865, the present year, it reached two dollars. That is tenfold in three years. My tooth-pulling fees have not gone up tenfold since the Mexican War, and I pull harder than Congress does.

Worse, each time Congress debated a raise, it refused to tax whiskey already distilled. The great Western houses ran their stills night and day before every increase and filled every barrel and barn. When the new rate came in, their untaxed stock was suddenly worth a fortune. That is like announcing the hanging a week ahead and being surprised when the condemned man has left for Canada. The little fellow up the Suncook with one forty-gallon pot gets no such favor. He makes his whiskey at this week's tax and sells it at a price set by men in Cincinnati who never smelled a New Hampshire swamp.

Eight Bushels, an Honest Basket, and a Bear

Every honest sum starts with the grain. A bushel of shelled corn weighs fifty-six pounds on the scale. Remember also that there are two bushels in this world. The struck bushel is leveled flat with a strike stick. The heaped bushel is piled in a cone like a fat man's belly. A dealer who buys heaped and sells struck has a profit that never shows on any ledger.

Last October a grain dealer out of Concord, whom I will not name for the sake of his decent grandchildren, came up Route 28 with eight bushels and measured them in his own basket. I have pulled teeth for twenty years and know when a thing is hollow. That basket rang wrong. It had a false bottom, a good two inches of pine board where corn ought to be. I paid him for seven bushels and told him why. He then went around the still-house to relieve himself on my woodpile in protest, and he walked straight into the circle of Barnaby's chain.

Barnaby does not run at a man. He arrives. He shook that dealer by the coat-tail like a terrier shaking a barn rat, and the corn hidden in the man's pockets sprayed across the dooryard like hail. When Barnaby dropped him to lick it up, the fellow slipped out of his coat like a snake out of its skin. He left behind one boot, half his coat, his hat, and the top of his left ear. I sent the ear-tip back to him in a pill box with my card. I am not a savage.

Here is the week's grain at true measure. Six bushels of cracked corn at a dollar sixty came to nine dollars and sixty cents. One bushel of rye cost a dollar fifty, and one bushel of barley malt, which does the converting, cost two dollars. That is eight bushels, four hundred and forty-eight pounds, for thirteen dollars and ten cents. My arch, the brick furnace the pot sits on, leaks heat like a sieve. Between the mash cooking and five runs, it eats three-quarters of a cord of hardwood a week, and at five dollars a cord delivered that is three dollars and seventy-five cents. Jugs, corks, yeast, a new strainer cloth and a quart of lamp oil add two dollars and fifteen. That makes nineteen dollars even before I pay myself a penny.

What the Revenue Man Could Read in a Woodpile

To check my figures I called in Captain Donald Vance, a retired revenue officer out of Manchester who once hunted copper through these hills. He holds that a still can hide behind a ledge or under a barn floor, but it cannot hide its appetite. In his own words: "It has to eat grain and it has to eat wood, and grain and wood leave tracks on paper and on the land."

In the dog days of one July, the Captain passed a Hooksett widow's place three times in a week and found her woodpile shorter each time. She had burned the better part of a cord in seven days of wilting heat. He figured it on a stone wall with a pencil, decided no woman bakes that many pies, and found her still in the root cellar with a flue cut up through the chimney. In a Manchester grain store's ledger he found a farmer buying sixty bushels of corn a month as "feed for two hogs." The hogs were thin as fence rails. The sixty-gallon pot was fat as a deacon. Any hog that eats sixty bushels a month and stays thin was taking its corn in liquid form.

His gauging rod once read a forty-gallon barrel in the Pemigewasset valley at about twenty, time after time. He rapped the staves like a man sounding a melon, and the top rang one note and the bottom another. A little keg had been fixed inside, holding twenty gallons untaxed. He also once seized a Goffstown man's almanac, in whose margins the fellow had carried the wrong figure every week since April. He believed he was clearing twenty dollars a week and was clearing about six. The Captain corrected his sums before writing the citation.

From Mash Tub to Low Wines

The law of the United States forbids making spirits for drinking without a federal permit, and I set down what follows for history and learning only. On the first day, six bushels of cracked corn go into four cooking tubs with about forty-five gallons of spring water to each. Cook it until the corn goes soft and sticky as a Sunday pudding. Yeast can no more eat starch than Barnaby can eat a church pew, so let the cook fall to about a hundred and fifty degrees before adding the ground malt and rye. The malt carries diastase, named by the French chemists Payen and Persoz in '33, which cuts the starch into sugar within a couple of hours of rest. If the mash is too hot, you cook the diastase dead. If it is too cool, the diastase dawdles like a deputy on his way to work.

At blood-warm, pitch the yeast. Mr. Pasteur tells the world it is a living beast, and I believe him, for the tubs heave three to five days. Keep them covered from flies, and keep the house aired, because the gas they breathe will not keep a man alive. Left open in a warm week, a tub falls to the mother of vinegar and smells like a wet dog that died in a pickle barrel thinking of cabbage. When the work is done, I have about a hundred and sixty gallons of wash at about seven and a half parts in a hundred, which is twelve gallons of pure spirit.

Strain off the grain, because thick mash on a direct fire scorches, and a scorched run tastes like the inside of a burnt chimney. I run four charges of forty gallons fast. They give about forty gallons of low wines at near twenty-eight parts in a hundred, or about eleven gallons of pure spirit. Most of a gallon stayed behind in the spent wash or escaped as vapour I could not catch.

The Spirit Run and the Cuts

On the sixth day, the forty gallons of low wines go back in the copper, brought up slow. Methanol boils at about a hundred and forty-eight degrees, grain spirit at about a hundred and seventy-three, and water at two hundred and twelve. So the poison comes first. Throw away the foreshots, the first quart or more, every drop, and let the worms go blind instead of the neighbors. Discard the heads too, the next couple of gallons, which smell of varnish and shoemaker's glue. Then the hearts come in, clean and smelling of corn and bread. Catch them jar by jar, testing each on the back of the hand, until the spirit turns flat and oily. Save those tails as feints for next week's run.

Keep the helmet and worm brightest of all, for there the copper does most of its quiet work against the sulfur stink. Mind also that alcohol vapour is heavier than air. It creeps along the floor like a deputy toward a free supper until it finds the firebox. Keep the worm outlet and jars well away from the flame, keep the joints tight and the fire low, and never leave a running still, not even to see why the bear is growling.

The Ledger at Week's End

My hearts hold about seven and six-tenths gallons of pure spirit at near a hundred and fifteen proof, about thirteen jars. Cut with spring water to a hundred proof, that comes to fifteen proof gallons and change, under two to the bushel. Ten gallons go to turnpike tavern keepers at two dollars and a half, which brings twenty-five dollars. Five go by the jug to gentlemen with sore teeth at three dollars and twenty cents, which brings sixteen. That is forty-one dollars in and nineteen out, leaving twenty-two clear. Then add the tax. Fifteen proof gallons at two dollars is thirty dollars, and a legal man is eight dollars in the hole before his license fees and bonds.

Twenty-two dollars is three times the seven and a half a week a mill hand earns at the Suncook dam. But a season is perhaps twenty weeks, and they are not twenty good ones. Two soured weeks swing better than a hundred and twenty dollars against me. A scorch spoils fifteen gallons. One raid carries off my sixty-pound, forty-five-dollar still, the worm, the jugs and the run, with a fine on top. After all that I have cleared about what the mill hand cleared. As the Captain put it, the big men did the profiting and the little men did the risking.

Ashes, Shavings, and the Blue Flame

Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, asks whether hickory ashes or red oak shavings in the thump keg clean out bad heads. They do not. Red oak has open pores that run the length of the grain, which is why coopers keep it for slack barrels. In a keg it gives only a puckery tang and some color. Hickory ash is full of potash, and potash run through with water makes lye, so the ash makes soapy, harsh liquor. A thump keg passes the early vapour along with the rest, and charging it with mash or low wines is the old way. The only cure for bad heads is to cut them away.

As for the tavern loafer's blue flame, methanol burns pale blue too. The color tells you nothing about lead or about a bad cut. Safety is made at the still with honest cuts and honest metal, not on the bar with a match. Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low.